$11.87-$16.95

Truong Tran Launch Party for “How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir”

Name: Truong Tran Launch Party for “How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir”
Start: 2026-10-18T14:00:00-07:00
Location: CCSF North Beach / Chinatown Bookstore

Sunday, October 18, 2026 · 2:00 PM
CCSF North Beach / Chinatown Bookstore · CA
Featuring Truong Tran
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Litquake presents Truong Tran in conversation with Garrett Caples City Lights Publishers celebrate the publication of How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir By Truong Tran Published by City Lights A neurodivergent gay war refugee navigates academia, racism, and indeed life itself as a poet, artist, and teacher How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir is an experiment in nonlinear autobiography by the author of the American Book Award-winning Book of the Other, Truong Tran. Beginning in the present–at a writing residency in the aftermath of this success–How to Exi(s)t moves back and forth in time, in bursts of brief poetic essays grouped by theme. The duality of the title thematizes a dilemma at the heart of the book: how does a poet separate himself from the academic career to which he’s devoted his professional life and what does being a teacher mean outside of it? Unpeeling the layers between present and past, Tran proceeds in reverse as he explores crucial events and figures in his life, including the reaction to the publication of Book of the Other, the dynamics of whiteness and power framing his repeated rejection for a tenure track position, the profound effect of his dyslexia on his evolution as a writer and artist, the repercussions of being outed by a newspaper after winning an undergrad poetry prize, traumatic episodes growing up in the Vietnamese diaspora in San Jose, and complicated relationships with both his family and his chosen family. Attempting to fathom these experiences and connect them to his present self, Tran examines and reexamines key details rather than dispensing with them in neat anecdotes, reflecting the volatile process of imagination and memory. Unsparing, even caustic in its instance on racism as a dominant note of American life, but marked by surprising tenderness and humor, How to Exi(s)t is a compelling portrayal of Tran’s pedagogical philosophy as well as an interrogation of a poetic language that conceals as much as it reveals. Truong Tran is a poet, visual artist, and teacher born in Saigon, Vietnam. His book-length poetry project Book of the Other: Small in Comparison (2021) received an American Book Award in 2022. He is the author of seven other collections, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within the Margins, Four Letter Words, 100 words (with Damon Potter), and Looking and Seeing/Seeing and Looking (with Damon Potter). He also written the children’s book Going Home Coming Home and an artist monograph, I Meant To Say Please Past the Sugar. His poems and books have been translated into Spanish, French, and Dutch. He is the recipient of the Poetry Center Prize, the Fund for Poetry Grant, the California Arts Council Grant, and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. Truong is also a visual artist who believes that art, be it poetry, cooking, sculpting, and even gardening, are his ways of thinking through the conscious of the times we live in. Truong lives in San Francisco and currently teaches at Northeastern University, Oakland. Garrett Caples is a poet, editor, and a former music and arts journalist. An editor at City Lights Books, he curates the new American poetry series, City Lights Spotlight. From 2005 to 2014, he wrote on hip hop, literature, and painting for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He is the author of numerous books, including: Lovers of Today (2021), Power Ballads (2016), Retrievals (2014), Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English (2010), Complications (2007), and The Garrett Caples Reader (1999). He coedited the Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (2013), Particulars of Place (2015) by Richard O. Moore, and Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems (2016) by Frank Lima. He makes his home in San Francisco. Litquake is a project of the Litquake Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit registered in the state of California. Litquake’s diverse live programs aim to inspire critical engagement with the key issues of the day, bring people together around the common humanity encapsulated in literature, and perpetuate a sense of literary community by providing a vibrant forum for Bay Area writing. Because they believe in literature as a public good, they work to produce events that are accessible to all. Visit them at https://www.litquake.org This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.